Care and Share Time Bank

This is the theory of ‘Fully Automated Luxury Communism’, an idea and ideology that in the (near) future, machines could provide for all our basic needs, and humans would be required to do very minimal work — perhaps as little as 10–12 hours a week — on quality control and similar oversight, to ensure luxury for everyone.

The trick, however, is subordinating the technology to global human needs rather than profits.

Putting modern technology to work for the people is an excellent goal, and democratizing the advantages of our advances is already happening.  It is a worthy cause to bring governments and nonprofit organizations onto the same technological footing as for-profit companies could result in huge strides towards improving living conditions, decreasing crime, ending poverty and other problems.

If it works, then why in the world are we not basing our whole economy on the finite construct of “time”? It would nearly be infallible, versus the legacy commodities model, which is full of holes and reject-able logic.A “time based economy” can be used with any nation state, group, or community based economics model. To make it simple, the value at the transaction would be time dollars in the form of a digital debit.

In the time based economy, each person enrolled, anywhere in the world would have an online account which is controlled by the debit card (not a citizenship card).

The time based economy primarily functions through the education, civics, and knowledge sector.

We need to be humble and accept that our entire conception of the world may be wrong. We should seek silence and contemplate our place in the great expanse of the cosmos. We should take pleasure in the rich flavor of our daily bread, rather than search and search for the perfectly arranged food selfie. We should spend our time solving the hard problems of society like injustice and bigotry and ecological crisis, rather than waste our time moving numbers around on a screen to justify outdated modes of energy production. We should enjoy the everyday fraternity of our communities, rather than constantly hunting for a new enemy.

I really wanted to find out whether, if everyone did exactly what they wanted to do, would all the necessary work get done? And I guessed, yes it would, and lots of beautiful ‘unnecessary’ work too, and probably with much greater quality and care. And now I hope MANs help us test that out!